Governor Jay Inslee’s presidential campaign platform has one plank: We must defeat climate change. The only way we’re going to get that done is if a president makes it their number-one priority, he says.
The pitch makes a certain kind of sense. Climate change is the greatest existential threat to the planet. Iowa and Nebraska and Mozambique are underwater. The West Coast is becoming a burn pile. And have you seen the new David Attenborough documentary on Netflix? Wild-eyed walruses are hurling their bodies off of cliffs due to the lack of habitat. Horrific, creepy jellyfish are overtaking the seas. There are like 14 orangutans left. And the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040,” according to the New York Times. That’s in 20 years.
Given this reality, it’s astounding that every Democrat running for president isn’t running on climate change. The candidates should be duking it out over who has the best strategy to address our acidic oceans and our smoked-out skies.
